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Okay so I would like to share with you the fruits of my bachelor's thesis. I wrote about, and studied how “non-white” characters, in western media such as film and video games, are portrayed. I chose three different cultures/ethnicities (non modern as I wanted to use Disney movies as an inspiration). I started this project in an earlier college course in which I redesigned three Disney princesses, these were Pocahontas, Jasmine and Mulan. I got this idea from Claire Hummel and you can see the old versions here: Jasmine Pocahontas Mulan
However I wanted to observe more how Chinese, Arab/Middle Eastern and Native American characters are showed in modern media as I think that they often are portrayed in an unfair way, or not included at all. Now, I’m a white Swede and I have no own experience of of how this would affect my own life, I just find it very important to include everyone and not paint the “default human” as white and western.

I kept the original three cultures and made two different versions for each.
The first one I designed with as trustworthy material as I could find, which was kinda hard since, for example, the paintings and sketches that illustrates the Native Americans are drawn by Europeans who drew them as a way to display for the people in Europe how the Natives looked. This often resulted in exaggerating decoration to make them look more exotic. So I also searched for journals describing the fashion in a less flourishing way. But I’m aware that my images still may be a misrepresentation since I have a western “view”.

The second versions I designed based on pop cultural references like characters from said cultures in games, movies and TV in the western world. These versions can be seen as very stereotypical.
As I said I based the characters on Mulan, Jasmine and Pocahontas which made it natural to take reference material from their time periods. Circa 1600 for the Native American since Pocahontas (Powhatan) has existed (duh). For the Chinese character I picked the Wei dynasty (Northern) since one play places Mulan there. The Arab character was a bit tricky since Arabia was so large. I chose to place her somewhere close to modern Israel and Jordan but in the pre-Islamic period.

By making two version I got to study how people reacted differently to them and how easily they connected the characters to the correct culture. The results were that the pop cultural designs were more recognizable with the cultures, however the received more negative reactions from the respondents ( for example the pop cultural arabic character was often labeled as “a whore” and was given negative attributes like ‘not trustworthy’ and ‘greedy’). But the pop cultural versions were also given more distinct roles like ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ while the “historical accurate” versions were described as side characters or NPCs. The “historical” versions were also seen as more realistic and fair representations of the cultures. The reason the pop cultural versions were more knowable has a lot to do with what we are shown in media, they are the representation.

If you’d like to know more, just comment or send me a note.

Description

Please read this before commenting!

Okay so I would like to share with you the fruits of my bachelor's thesis. I wrote about, and studied how “non-white” characters, in western media such as film and video games, are portrayed. I chose three different cultures/ethnicities (non modern as I wanted to use Disney movies as an inspiration). I started this project in an earlier college course in which I redesigned three Disney princesses, these were Pocahontas, Jasmine and Mulan. I got this idea from Claire Hummel and you can see the old versions here: Jasmine Pocahontas Mulan
However I wanted to observe more how Chinese, Arab/Middle Eastern and Native American characters are showed in modern media as I think that they often are portrayed in an unfair way, or not included at all. Now, I’m a white Swede and I have no own experience of of how this would affect my own life, I just find it very important to include everyone and not paint the “default human” as white and western.

I kept the original three cultures and made two different versions for each.
The first one I designed with as trustworthy material as I could find, which was kinda hard since, for example, the paintings and sketches that illustrates the Native Americans are drawn by Europeans who drew them as a way to display for the people in Europe how the Natives looked. This often resulted in exaggerating decoration to make them look more exotic. So I also searched for journals describing the fashion in a less flourishing way. But I’m aware that my images still may be a misrepresentation since I have a western “view”.

The second versions I designed based on pop cultural references like characters from said cultures in games, movies and TV in the western world. These versions can be seen as very stereotypical.
As I said I based the characters on Mulan, Jasmine and Pocahontas which made it natural to take reference material from their time periods. Circa 1600 for the Native American since Pocahontas (Powhatan) has existed (duh). For the Chinese character I picked the Wei dynasty (Northern) since one play places Mulan there. The Arab character was a bit tricky since Arabia was so large. I chose to place her somewhere close to modern Israel and Jordan but in the pre-Islamic period.

By making two version I got to study how people reacted differently to them and how easily they connected the characters to the correct culture. The results were that the pop cultural designs were more recognizable with the cultures, however the received more negative reactions from the respondents ( for example the pop cultural arabic character was often labeled as “a whore” and was given negative attributes like ‘not trustworthy’ and ‘greedy’). But the pop cultural versions were also given more distinct roles like ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ while the “historical accurate” versions were described as side characters or NPCs. The “historical” versions were also seen as more realistic and fair representations of the cultures. The reason the pop cultural versions were more knowable has a lot to do with what we are shown in media, they are the representation.

If you’d like to know more, just comment or send me a note.